The phone immediately started ringing off the hook. I began typing up a list, adding to it every day, and making thirty new copies each day at the HBPA office. I’d put them in the track kitchen, at the timer’s stand near the rail, where the clocker stood for horses who did timed works, in the men’s bathroom. “Could you stand here for a minute and make sure no one comes in?” I’d asked someone passing by. “I just want to tape a couple of these on the wall.”
Each day, along with adding new sport horse people to the list, I’d subtract any who had already connected with a trainer and bought the horse they were looking for. I’d have to take down all the lists I put up the previous morning and put up the new copies.
It took off like crazy. Trainers would rush up to me. “All the lists are gone. Do you have any more?”
Those in the sport disciplines also kept the pace brisk through a kind of passive word of mouth. “Where did you get that horse?” someone might ask another. “From the track,” the person would respond, piquing their interest.
As terrific as this was, it didn’t all go off without a hitch. Sometimes a trainer would say to me, “I called people on the list about my horse, and no one wants it. The trailer is coming by at such and such a time. If no one buys it by then, it’s going on.”
Frantic, with maybe two hours left, I’d start to call people myself. Maybe the guy had an outdated list, or maybe he didn’t make calls to all the people who might be a match.
Without lying, I did everything I could to make a horse sound as appealing as possible. If a bay, or reddish horse, had no white markings, which are desirable in the sport discipline world—they call the white spots “chrome”—it was considered ho-hum. That was Baby’s coloration. He had had only a few white hairs between his eyes. But I never said “no markings” for such horses when talking to potential buyers. Instead, I’d tell them, “Oh, he’s the cutest horse—plain-brown-wrapper bay.”
Sometimes I found someone who would buy the horse. I’d run from the HBPA office back to the trainer and front the money by writing him a personal check. He could have cash in two hours from the kill buyer. He couldn’t afford to trust me that some person entirely unknown to him would follow through. Only if he had the agreed-upon fee in hand would he consent to hold onto the horse for two days until transport could be arranged.
I, in turn, had to hope that the buyer would show up. Fortunately, I never had a situation where someone didn’t. I had to meet each of them at the gate since they wouldn’t have been allowed on the backstretch without my signing them in.
Sometimes, when I was going down the list making phone calls, someone would say, “It’s not for me, but let me call somebody who I think the horse might be right for, and I’ll call you back.” While waiting, I’d see the truck coming. I’d literally have minutes to save a horse from death. Sometimes I was successful, but there were plenty of times that I wasn’t. I needed two more hours that I didn’t have.
I bolstered my efforts by walking up and down the shedrows with the horses-wanted list. These were hot days, in the nineties, with high humidity. “I know you’re busy,” I’d say, “but maybe your wife would make a call. These people pay a lot more than the kill fee. Why not get a couple hundred dollars extra?” Some trainers refused to deal with me. They would just let a horse go to the kill buyer rather than go through the trouble of dialing a few phone numbers.
Coming to terms with who so many of these people really were was one of the most difficult aspects of the struggle. I had worked so hard in the beginning to cultivate friendships with people on the backstretch. I had wanted to be “in,” and on some level I was. But so many of those very same people, I learned more and more, couldn’t have cared less about horses. We had absolutely nothing in common. Yet I couldn’t show my dismay, my anger, my grief. All the while, while working alone with no one else back there to help, I had to remain chipper, friendly, acting as though my heart wasn’t broken about Baby, about all the other horses at risk. Making it harder still was that every time I couldn’t keep a horse from the kill buyer’s hands, I experienced it as a personal failure. I berated myself for not having done more.
I always remembered the horses I wasn’t able to save much better than the ones I could. It was not hard to see Baby in each horse that ended up on the truck, whether or not it had his coloring. Sometimes it was the hooves, like iron rather than the seashell-like hooves of most Thoroughbreds. Other times, it was the way the horse’s eyes were set in his head, the slant of the shoulder, or the massive rump muscles. Some horses had Baby’s bushy, fly-away mane. Often, it was simply the way a horse would react to me as I examined him—smelling my hair or blowing into my nose. Those were signature moves of Baby’s.
Once the horses were jammed onto the huge trailer, they stopped being treated like living beings. Without food and water, they’d be forced to wait while the summer sun beat down on the vehicle’s metal exterior, pawing, beating each other, literally dying of thirst. They were now meat, and even minimum animal husbandry was refused them. Some were lame, like Baby. They were going to go through the entire slaughter process with a broken leg, in horrific pain, rather than undergo chemical euthanasia.
If there had been any doubt about their ultimate fate, it was erased when an article came out in the Daily Racing Form that August about a racehorse named Exceller. A very famous racehorse, Exceller had run in the late 1970s and was best remembered as the only horse to beat two Triple Crown winners. Such a feat had been unheard of.
He retired in 1979, going to a farm in Kentucky to stand at stud. In 1991, he was transferred to Sweden to continue breeding, and when the Daily Racing Form went to check up on him for a “Where Are They Now?” column it used to publish now and then, the reporter found out they were several months late. He had been sent to a slaughterhouse that April.
That’s when I realized it wasn’t just cheap claiming horses at our crummy track who were being sent to their deaths. It was pervasive. Even this famous horse, who had no doubt earned his various owners more than a million dollars, was slaughtered at the end of his stud career rather than allowed to live out his life in peace.
I couldn’t talk about this to people on the outside. If I had spoken about slaughter publicly or even about the concept of “rescuing” horses, I would have been forced to resign from the HBPA board and lost my track license, and that would have been the end of my ability to help save the Thoroughbreds. The board was okay with me trying to improve racing; it would not have been okay with me impugning its members’ bread and butter.
On very bad days, when the truck left full, I would go straight to the barn upon arriving home because there I could just sit on the hay and wail. I couldn’t cry in the house because John had been opposed to my going back to the track from day one. He would have been even angrier at me if he knew the degree to which it upset me.
The horses never got used to my crying. They hated for me to sob like that. It made them nervous. Tense, they’d prance, move around, bump into each other in the run-in attached to the barn. “What can we do to help? What can we do?” They wanted the herd secure, relaxed, not like this, not with one of their own in distress.
If I could compose myself and remain calm before going in, they did better. I’d gently cry on their shoulders, breathe in their scents. Interacting with them, even sadly, was better than just sitting on the hay weeping uncontrollably.
Poor Sissy. She took my moods the hardest. Still only a yearling but already having shown clear signs of her temperament, she was skittish and had a difficult time coping. It was my own fault. In my grief over Baby when she was born, and because physically she was such a searing reminder of him, to my discredit, I couldn’t bear to bond closely with her when she most needed it. I hadn’t done all the work with her that I had with Baby and then Scarlett—blowing New Year’s Eve noisemakers in the barn, waving white sheets, setting out pieces of plywood for her to walk over. My not having worked to desensitize her to unexpected so
unds and sights made her more afraid of things in general.
An unusual noise would send her running. If I was walking her down the road and someone started a lawnmower in the distance, I’d have to have very strong control of her lead line and really talk to her—“It’s okay, Sissy”—scratching her neck all the while so she wouldn’t try to bolt. I could see her muscles tense. To this day Sissy is always ready for flight, in no small part because of the attention I failed to give her when she was very young.
I had little time to devote to her emotional maturation even when I might have felt more ready. Working to save horses became increasingly difficult as fall arrived and the racing season was coming to a close. Trainers needed to dump the Thoroughbreds who certainly weren’t going to win anywhere else if they couldn’t win in Detroit. It was killing me. If I saved fifty horses that year, probably 150 went unsaved, the greatest proportion of them in October and November.
I was exhausted, physically as well as emotionally, making too many trips to the bar across the street from the track to try to erase all the hours I spent in what was often an unsuccessful attempt to save an animal. Adding to the strain were the trips toward Detroit in one direction to continue my work as a court reporter and then, three to four times a week, in the opposite direction after work to go visit Scarlett in Ann Arbor.
As tired as I was, however, it was always such a pleasure to see her. As soon as I exited the car she’d know I was there, as the parking lot was right next to the pasture where they’d turn her out. I’d call her name, and up would come her head. Once she ran to me at the fence, I’d scratch the big groove between her cheekbones, where flies might bite. She couldn’t relieve the itching herself because the indentation was too deep for her to reach by sliding alongside an object. If we moved inside the barn, I’d scratch her neck. She’d tilt her head up and turn it almost with a sigh, the way someone might sigh if you were scratching a part of their back they couldn’t reach. “Mmmm, get that side a little more.” She’d swing her head up over my shoulders and the top of my own head, then swing it back again for another scratch on the other side.
I was so happy to be surrounded there by the other boarders, who also adored their horses and who never would have thought to “get rid of” them. So different was it from track culture. I loved grooming Scarlett in the barn, in like company. We’d all share stories about the cute things our horses did, their special traits. People didn’t talk about horses lovingly at the track.
Making it better still was that, to my great delight, Scarlett had a wonderful surprise in store. At the very end of the season, just before Thanksgiving, her name was announced at an awards dinner as the champion novice horse of the year in eventing for the entire state of Michigan. It was as if she skipped a grade, going straight over “beginner,” the first rung on the ladder, to “novice.” And not just reaching “novice” but advancing to the pinnacle. Some horses stay in “novice” eventing for three years before being ready to move on to the next level. Her winning was that much more remarkable because it was straight off the track, where all the horses do is run counterclockwise, throwing off their muscle balance.
I had had no idea how successfully Scarlett had been competing, as I hadn’t been counting the points she was racking up at shows throughout that summer and fall. It was tremendously overwhelming to hear her name called out, then to go up in front of almost 100 people to be presented with her two-foot blue ribbon and a blanket for her with the word “Champion” embroidered on it. It was affirmation that everything I thought of her, that I knew her to be capable of, was true. I had known that everything I believed about Baby’s abilities were true, too, but he never really had a chance to prove it because I kept choosing the wrong circumstances for him. If I had felt comfortable bursting into tears, I would have. Hardly anyone in the room knew anything about Baby. I was elated and rueful all at once.
In fact, as proud as Scarlett made me, and as much as I wanted to continue to make right on Baby’s death, I was feeling drained by my own regrets, as well as by the goings-on at the track, to the point that I decided not to return the next year. I just couldn’t bear any more witness to these killings as business decisions, couldn’t bear to hear people say it didn’t make any difference that the horses were whinnying for help while crammed inside the death trailers because “they were just going to die, anyway,” couldn’t cope with continually seeing before me the images of those horses I hadn’t been able to save, each one, like Baby, another of my failures. I made it through the last couple of weeks of the racing season by counting down. “Ten more days, nine more days, eight more days…” Soon, I’d never go back to the track again.
CHAPTER TEN
I spent the winter healing in the barn, the decision not to go back to the track made easier by the Detroit Race Course’s announcement that the coming 1998 season would be its last. The higher-ups had been hoping to install slot machines and transform the racecourse into a racino. But the state of Michigan turned them down. Casino Windsor had already opened just across the river from Detroit in Canada, a true Vegas-style casino just thirty-five minutes away. And downtown Detroit, just twenty minutes along the expressway, was due to get three casinos, approved on a ballot by popular vote. All these new casinos, very powerful with a lot of money to throw behind their claims to the local territory, were never going to let a racino materialize. The track would be closing.
Two years earlier, I had worked very hard to procure slot machines for the racecourse, pushing for it as a member of the HBPA’s political action committee and even participating in a press conference held in the state capitol. My personal stock with the track’s higher-ups had risen astronomically. “I never want to be on the other side of you,” Ladbroke executive Bill Bork said to me at the time, pleased with my presentation. Now here we were, exactly in that position. With my suing the track, I couldn’t be more on the other side.
The decision to close helped explain why Ladbroke dragged its heels fixing the racecourse and did such a shoddy job of overseeing the repairs. It had no doubt already known that it would be shuttering its gates.
My wish to make right on Baby’s death notwithstanding, my resolve never to return was only strengthened by the news. Rather than feel I could handle trying to save horses for just one more year, I knew that an imminent permanent closing would mean the need for trainers to get rid of more horses than ever—a number I would find too overwhelming.
Michigan had always been a racing state, with a lot of trainers who actually put down roots there rather than travel nomadically from track to track throughout the country, as many do. In the 1950s, the Detroit Race Course was considered one of the premier tracks, right up there with Churchill Downs, so to work there had once come with a certain prestige. Once the track closed, trainers who had made their homes in Michigan would not take their horses somewhere else; they would get out of the business—and get rid of their Thoroughbreds as expediently as possible. I had already been through a season during which I lost more horses than I saved. I knew that in this climate of trainers needing to get rid of even sound horses, my efforts would be futile. Besides, I had already exhausted potential sport discipline buyers with my articles in local newsletters. There was no one else to tap into.
Taking care of my own horses at home had the effect of a tonic. Being near them warmed me, and I could feel my depression lift some. Just grooming them, letting them in and out of the pastures, scrubbing their water pails, removing debris from the crevices at the bottom of their feet—it all proved restoring.
Scarlett wasn’t there. She was training through the winter, which was fine with me since she had done so well the previous year, and I continued to visit her several times a week.
But in the barn I still had Beauty, Pumpkin, Pat, and Sissy. Sissy, now going on two, had grown to the size of a bull moose. So muscular and strong boned had she become, like Baby, that you would not immediately have perceived her as a filly. And with her forelock peren
nially covering the star on her forehead, and her bushy mane and tail, which, like Baby, she had inherited from Pat, she looked uncannily like him, down to her iron hooves.
While I tried to bond with her, exhaling into her nose and giving her treats, it did not bring me comfort that she looked like her brother. Instead, it was a reminder of what I hadn’t accomplished despite my having gotten the track fixed and saving dozens of horses. I was never going to bring Baby back, never going to fix what I had done to him.
Sissy was the only one of the four who elicited in me mixed emotions. The others were pure joy.
Beauty, my very first horse, I had already had for almost fourteen years, since 1984. We bought her even before we closed on the house. I loved to ride her, and she loved to be ridden, so it was easy to go on the spur of the moment. It’s difficult to get most horses away from the herd. But Beauty was never barn sour, meaning unwilling to leave her mates. For her it was a treat to quit the barn, the pastures. “Come on Beauts,” I’d say. “Let’s go visiting.” It didn’t matter how many days had passed since I had last ridden her. She never acted silly and bucked, or raced off, the way some horses do when they haven’t been mounted in a while. She never needed to be warmed up with lunging—having the “vinegar” taken out of her by being exercised in a circle on a thirty-foot line with a lunge whip with which you strike the ground if a horse refuses to move. I didn’t even need a saddle. I could just grab a bridle and throw it on. She was only 15.2 hands high—easy.
Beauty had a naturally fast walk, which I like in a horse, and as she moved away from the house, the other horses would all call out to her while running around in the pasture, going crazy that one of their own was leaving. But she’d just keep going. Baby had been the same way. I loved it because it made me feel they’d rather be with me than with the rest of the herd. Once in a while Beauty would whinny back to the others, but not as a rule.
Saving Baby Page 17